Pros: Very long battery life, lots of equalizer settings and useful playback options like bookmarks, song rating etc., good voice recording qualityCons: Terrible buttons, confusing navigation through menus, no user manual included in package, bad radio reception, video conversion to the supported .SMV file format takes too much timeSummary: I bought my 4GB iRiver E30 three months ago and I chose it mainly because of the advertised 52 hours of battery life. So far I am really impressed with it. I listen to loud music for a couple of hours almost every day and the only times when I ... Expand full review

Summary: I bought my 4GB iRiver E30 three months ago and I chose it mainly because of the advertised 52 hours of battery life. So far I am really impressed with it. I listen to loud music for a couple of hours almost every day and the only times when I re-charge the device are when I connect it to my computer to upload new files (usually once a week). I think it may really last for 52 hours of constant playback although I haven't tried that. There was no user manual included in the package and it took me quite some time to figure out the weird navigation and to discover all the hidden menus which are accessed by pressing and holding the right arrow button. Finding out how to adjust the equalizers and the song fast-forwarding speed (Scan speed) was challenging and the second one I discovered a whole month after buying the E30! The sound quality when playing audio files is average but with some equalizer adjustments it sounds decent. I think that the original headphones cut off the bass and muffle the sound although I haven't tried it with another brand of headphones. The E30 has some really useful playback options and the one I enjoy the most is the "Bookmarks". I usually listen to large 2-hour electronic music sets and I am happy that I can bookmark specific places in the big MP3 files so that I don't have to scan to find them from the beginning. The top scan speed (x20) is too slow for large files. The built in FM radio doesn't sound good and the reception is not clean most of the time. Voice recordings through the built in microphone have good quality. When I got the E30 I thought that I would use the video playback feature frequently but the time needed to convert a movie or a video to the .SMV format supported by the device really renders it useless. It takes several hours to convert a one-hour XViD video file and if you have that much free time it's better for your eyes to watch the video on your computer. Apart from that the video playback is smooth. The main problem of the E30 in my opinion is the design of the buttons. Actually they aren't real buttons. There are places marked by arrows on the perfectly flat front panel of the player which you have to press. The arrows are black and the background is black so you can't see the buttons in the dark. Also you can't feel the buttons with your finger so you can't change the volume or skip the current song without taking the player out of your pocket. They are hard to press and too bouncy so if you press them too lightly they tend to double click. Thus instead of rewinding or fast-forwarding you change the current song which is very annoying. I installed the latest firmware (1.07 in this moment) on my device and the only bug I found so far is that sometimes I can't delete files from the player's menu and I have to connect to it from my computer to do this. You can connect to the player without any additional software but in order to be able to convert videos you have to install iRiver PLUS4 or some other .SMV converter.